Williams, Rhys. "The spotty schoolboy and single
mother taking the mantle from Roald Dahl," The Independent
(London), 29 January 1999

A SINGLE mother of 34 and a bespectacled orphan schoolboy may not be
the most promising combination, but together they have become the publishing
sensation of the past two years.

The latest chapter in the remarkable story of Joanna Rowling's beguiling
literary creation began yesterday with the paperback publication of the
second book in her Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Chamber
of Secrets.

Potter is the schoolboy wizard whose enthusiastic adoption by children
and grown-ups in their hundreds of thousands has had critics hailing Ms
Rowling as the new Roald Dahl.

Platform One at King's Cross Station briefly becomes the mythical Platform
9 and three-quarters, the place from which young Harry departs for school
at the beginning of each new term and which functions like the wardrobe
in C S Lewis's Narnia chronicles.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first in what
will eventually develop into a seven-part series, introduced the eponymous
hero to a generation of computer games junkies previously thought to have
been lost to the charms of print. The results have been extraordinary.
Sales of the two books are now nudging half-a-million, while the hardback
version of Chamber of Secrets spent its first month on the shelf as the
bestseller across all books.

Ms Rowling has garnered an armful of awards, including the Smarties
Book Prize (the children's equivalent of the Booker) in consecutive years
and a place on the 1998 Whitbread shortlist. Hollywood lent its validation
last autumn when Warner Brothers secured the film rights to both books
for a seven-figure sum.

Master Potter is an orphan forced to live under the stairs by cruel
relatives until he learns on his 11th birthday that he is, in fact, the
son of famous wizards, whereupon he is whisked off to Hogwart's School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There he takes lessons in potions, herb lore
and Quidditch, a kind of football played on broomsticks. Oh yes, and he
saves the school and the world from the fallen angel Lord Voldemort, a
former head boy of Hogwarts, who chooses to turn his magic against the
institution. In other words, a ripping yarn of good versus evil that legitimately
conjures up the New Testament, only with characters that recall Roald
Dahl.

The names of Dahl and C S Lewis are frequently mentioned alongside Ms
Rowling's, a comparison at which she has balks. "C S Lewis is quite
simply a genius and I'm not a genius," she said. "And while
I think Dahl is a master at what he did, I do think my books are more
moral than his. He also wrote very overblown comic characters, whereas
I think mine are more three-dimensional."

Either way, critics have universally lauded Ms Rowling's as she carries
readers into a world of invention where Harry flies a car into a tree
in flagrant breach of rules on the misuse of Muggle (as normal people
are known) artefacts. In the second book Harry unravels the secrets of
giant spiders, schoolmates turned to stone and an unpleasant creature
that has taken to lurking in the school plumbing.

Potter was drawn with spectacles because, Ms Rowling said, she had worn
thick glasses as a child and was frustrated that "speccies"
were swots but never heroes.

Nominally pitched at 9 to 12-year-olds, Harry's appeal has been broader.
Parents who were complaining about their children's refusal to turn off
the light until they had finished one more chapter became the next Potter
converts. The publishers Bloomsbury took the unusual step of bringing
out an adult version of the first book last September. It was wrapped
in a design-conscious cover featuring a black and white photograph of
a steam train with the title flashed in citrus orange letter. The idea
was to spare adult readers on public transport the chore of hiding the
children's version behind their morning paper.

If Harry's adventures make for compelling reading, then Ms Rowling's
story is also worth a chapter or two. After working for Amnesty International,
she went to Portugal to teach English. There she married a journalist,
but within weeks of the birth of a daughter, Jessica, they had separated.

Divorced, penniless and now a single mother, she returned to Edinburgh,
where her sister lived. Much of the first novel was written in Nicolson's,
a cafe in the city where she would escape her cold and miserable flat.
While Jessica slept in her pram, Ms Rowling stretched out her coffees
and scribbled furiously away in long hand.

The manuscript was dispatched to Penguin, who turned it down, and then
HarperCollins, where it gathered dust for a year. Finally she enlisted
the help of a literary agent and, within a day of sending the book, Bloomsbury
gratefully snaffled it up. The rest could well be literary and cinematic
history.